Download TED talks en-masse with TED Downloader

Most everyone knows about the TED conference, which grew from a one-off event held in California in 1984 to being the one of internet’s most important forums for thinkers to present their ideas. The so, called ‘TED Talks’ are not only thought provoking but quite entertaining.

TED Downloader grabs a list of TED Talks (1048 in all, as of this writing, but growing every day), lets you select the ones you would like to download, and proceeds to do it for you; useful for anyone who has intermittent or unpredictable broadband access, anyone who is travelling and/or want to load up their device with TED Talks, and will appeal to the hoarder in all of us.

How to use: decide on the quality of the videos, click update links, and check the TED Talks you want to download. Next, click ‘Get Ted Talks’ and the tool will start downloading.

The verdict: this program will appeal to a certain kind of user: the TED fanatic who wants to have all of them, and/or wants to build and keep their own local TED library. For the rest of us simply downloading the TED talk or two or several that we want off off YouTube will be the better option.

This program, moreover, is still young and can be greatly improved; for example by adding the option to type in strings by which to filter the list, as one example; also, by remembering where your download folder is and auto-detecting the episode that you may already have (and, say, displaying these in a different color), etc. Luckily, the developer is actively improving this software and you should see better versions coming out in the near future.